Tales from the front line in the hunt for the perfect SCART television for use with the MAME arcade game emulator.

Sunday, 26 February 2012

Pots progress

I received a few packages last week: 1 from Digikey, 1 from Jomac and 1 from Ozstick. After getting straight into the latter two (and subsequently feeling pretty disappointed with the combined result), I spent today working with the 6 Vishay potentiometers I bought from Digikey for my Blaupunkt IS70-33 VTN television.

It was a pretty fiddly operation and soldering was sweaty work on a 34 degree Celsius day. However, it was a complete success! I now have external analogue controls for V-size, V-position, H-size and H-position (pincushion and trapezium are still to come). I even wired things so that the direction of the pots is intuitive (e.g. clockwise expands the height, anticlockwise moves the image left). With these controls outside the TV case and at the front of the screen, I can now quickly perfect the borders for every game I load up in GroovyMAME!

The cool thing with this setup is that you don't have to compromise. GroovyMAME does a great job of centring the image for each modeline and gets pretty damn close in most cases. With these extra knobs for size and position controls I can quickly account for the last few millimetres and get things PERFECT. The other cool thing is that you can adjust for games like Metal Slug that normally has a built in border. Once the pots are mounted in the TV casing (meaning I don't have to pick each one up to adjust), the whole process will be under 10 seconds for each game.

Now I just need to drill some holes! I practised today on a spare Loewe input plate that I have. However, the plastic started to tear and rip once the drill bit got halfway. Probably gonna need a better drill than the crappy Ozito I borrowed from work. Can't wait to finish this little project!